SOCIAL OUTCASTS: David Wright, reacting during Friday night’s loss, and the Mets have been the target of their fans’ frustrations this season on Twitter. Photo: JASON SZENES/NY POST

SOCIAL OUTCASTS: David Wright, reacting during Friday night’s loss, and the Mets have been the target of their fans’ frustrations this season on Twitter. (JASON SZENES/NY POST)

Social media has opened up a lot of doors. You want to rip a politician? Sign on to Facebook, 40 of your friends have beaten you to it. Want to make fun of the dreadful TV show you just watched? Invent a fun hashtag, and away you go on Twitter (#WhyIsntNewsroomBetter).

Sports is where the shackles have really come off.

Time was, you would suffer through an awful loss by one of your teams and you had one of three choices:

1) Call a friend as fanatical as you to vent … only that friend was often a) not quite as obsessed as you; b) married, and thus unwilling (or unable) to carry the anger quite as far; c) engaged in something more exciting than watching a hockey game on a Saturday night.

2) Punch a wall, in solitude.

3) Swear you were never watching the bleepin’ team again … at least until the next time they were on television.

Now you know where to find fellow true believers. Now, the moment Mike Baxter forgets to run to second base on a base hit by Ruben Tejada, your Twitter feed explodes with rage. Russell Martin just turned in another 0-for-4? Fire away. Melo just shot 6-for-30? Wayne Hunter just dosey-doed another bull rusher? Lundqvist just gave up a soft goal?

No team in the short history of Twitter has explored the limits of this Brave New World like the 2012 Mets, however. The great thing about Twitter is that if you follow 10-15 hardcore fans of every team — as I do — then each of those 10 to 15 people has at least 10 to 15 fellow believers, so when stuff happens you can get a good bombardment through all the tweets and re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

These Mets have tested the limits of Twitter sanity. They have been both eight games over .500 and, before yesterday’s 3-1 win over the Astros, 12 games under. Because they have managed to wildly overachieve AND grievously underachieve. Because they have inspired both overwhelming pride among their fiercest fans AND the deepest phases of despair.

Two unique Twitter elements underline this. One is our own Ken Davidoff (@KenDavidoff) who every year predicts a final record total for both teams, then dutifully accounts for his guess every day of the season. Yankees fans mostly greet this with amusement (a 97-win prediction will do that). Mets fans? Through three months, they daily reminded Kenny what a fool he was (and a sinister one at that) for guessing 78 wins.

By now, they think he’s the most shameless homer since Harry Caray.

But there was also a line of demarcation this year. It was fun to see how much Mets fans embraced this team through mid-July (with reason, since they were eminently embraceable). Never was this more obvious than the night of July 6. The Mets lost to the Cubs that night, 8-7, but they scored three in the ninth and only lost when Lucas Duda lined into a game-ending double play with the tying and winning runs on base. It seemed to embody all the good about the Mets, and Twitter was head over heels:

“I love this team!” “This team has reminded me why I love baseball!” “Even when they lose I feel like I win!” “This team has too much character to collapse!”

That was 43 games ago. The Mets are 12-31 in those games. Twitter sings a different tune now, angrier than Johnny Rotten’s old songbook. Fans still get mad at Davidoff. But that’s because bad baseball will make you angry at everyone. Just take a peek at your timeline.

Whacks

There is so much anger attached to Joe Paterno now, and rightly so, so in many ways any book that didn’t begin and end thusly — “Joe Paterno enabled a pedophile.” — in these times is likely to draw ire. But I do urge you to read Joe Posnanski’s biography, “Paterno,” because in choosing to present a full picture of the man’s life — both before and after Jerry Sandusky — what you get is a stark and unflinching picture of everything Paterno ransomed, and lost, by choosing the path he did. A life is never defined entirely by a man’s good, or by his bad. And neither should a properly executed biography.

* The Yankees entered the weekend 0-45 when trailing after eight innings, which sort of makes you wonder whatever happened to old Five O’Clock Lightning.

* Watched a Knicks Classic game on MSG the other day, with Marcus Camby and Kurt Thomas on floor together. That was 12 years ago. And 12 weeks from now.

* Baseball players doped out of greed, out of a lust for fame and money and all of that stuff. Lance Armstrong did whatever he did and despite all the money he made on behalf of cancer, I can’t help but think what he did was even more sinister than the ballplayers. People looked at him as some kind of secular saint. And he never bothered to disabuse them of that idea.

Whack Back at Vac

Chris Freeman: I want the Jets to go 0-16, make the playoffs and lose each round all the way to the Super Bowl, making them the first team in NFL history to go 0-19. You know who else wouldn’t mind that? Woody Johnson.

Vac: You have to say this: the Jets do inspire the most creative opinions I’ve ever seen.

@DSThorne1980: Lance Armstrong wants to “concentrate on his charity” but not fighting his innocence surely damages the charity and its credibility doesn’t it?

@MikeVacc: On every conceivable level.

Andy Romanic: Why do I think that if P.T. Barnum were alive today that he would either own or work for the Mets?

Nick Schmidt: You have the Jets’ tipping point wrong. It should be the GM and the owner. When Sanchez had quality offensive line and receiver help, the team went to the AFC title game twice. We know this was not the case last year, and it’s probably worse this year. Put the heat on Mike Tannenbaum and the owner for this circus.

Vac: Well, an owner is never really on a clock. But a GM certainly can be. And this GM certainly is.